I tried at home the method of distilling water by collecting the steam of the boiling water on a cloth placed over the top. You use sevelal cloths if possible one after the other and lift them off the pot with a stick to avoid being scalded. When they have cooled, you wring out the pure water in them.

I gave it a quick try by placing a handkerchief but the steam literally passed through it and the handkerchief never got wet enough. I also scalded one finger.

As Martin pointed out, some chemical substances could be distilled at the same time and it would take too much fuel anyway. It's certainly not possible if you are sitting on a roof, etc. The best is to store water.

Frankie

Heck, why not just store the hydrogen part, and burn it in an oxygen atmosphere when you want water?

<img src="/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

"Heck, why not just store the hydrogen part, and burn it in an oxygen atmosphere when you want water?"

Reminds me of a chemistry class way back in high school.

We had seperated water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity and had the gasses stored in those round glass things with long snouts (forgot the name of that glassware). Someone asked the teacher, "Can you turn it back into water again?"

He said "Sure!" and whipped out his lighter. Next thing he said, as he was rising from the floor behind his desk, was "Am I cut?! Am I cut?!" We never found the resulting water. Just glass fragments all over the place. (Nobody was hurt, luckily!)

He did it way too fast. This is why fuel cells are going to be so awesome. Hydrogen in, water and electricity out.

Sorry I didn’t get back sooner. My internet connection died.

I agree that storage of water is the best approach to an emergency prep. I myself do have some jugs of water stored for that purpose. I sit high enough that flooding is not a problem however, a power outage shuts down my well. My original question was asked of me and I couldn’t answer it with certainty. That is why I came to you folks. I was not sure if any means of filtering or chemical treatment would work. I wonder if someone will be working on this issue, now that this has happened, in preparation for a similar disaster that hopefully won't happen.

BTW: The EPA has done some water sampling and posted the results here.

The witches brew in the streets of NO there is no way you could purify it. It just has too many diffrent mixes for any one or even several methods to work.

Distilling would be best to remove disolved solids. Salt or other like chemical cpompounds. Also any bio contamination. As they can be treated as solids. But volitile liquids such as patrolium would go along for the ride. It you had the wherewithall to set up fractional distillation some of thes would be removed.

Then you would have to run it through a charcoal filter. This might remove most of the volitile contamination. Patrolium being the worst.

Then a reverse osmosis filter to clean it further.

Then maybe a second seperate charcoal filter.

You might end up with something drinkable. But and its a big one fith some of the stuff mixed in fromm chemical plants and even household chemicals the chance are still far too great that it might still be a leathal drink. I would not trust it.

Has anyone tried Polar Pure? I'm thinking of getting a bottle. It has a long shelf life, even after use, and treats up to 500 gallons of water. I'm thinking it would be a good backup to my MicroPur MP1 tablets.

Okay, back to chem 101 eh? Here goes.

In order to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen, you need to start with a pure source. If you use contaminated water, you will be electroyzing these molecular compounds as well, and your off gas production will be corrupted and unusable. It could also quickly ruin your electrolytic screens (fuel cells thus require pure water, or other pure polar hydogen molecular compound).

As for distillation, it is not whether another substance has the same boiling point as water, but the same condensation point as water, that will cause problems with purity of the process.

My suggestion is to pump all that sewage back into Lake Ponchatrain, add copious amounts of aerobic and anerobic bacteria, stir often, and let it all get digested over the next decade or so, then rebuild the ecosystem to deal with what's left. In a hundred years or so, we could then dredge the lake bottom to remove all the heavy metal precipitates and undissolved hydrocarbons, send these to the smelter, and things would be back to "normal"??? Nothing cleans up contamination so well as Mother Nature at work, it just doesn't go according to our relatively short timeline is all. Even DDT gets broken down in time.

The truism "the solution to pollution is dillution" is usually true.

This is what I was wondering about when they starting pumping all that garbage out of NO. Didn't seem like a terribly good idea to put it back in nearby lakes, but I can't say I have a better idea. Draining the flooded city seemed to be a top priority, but I don't understand why. Reports were that everything was totally destroyed anyway. But trying to treat all that polluted water would have been nearly impossible, so what else could have been done?